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<title>Forty, Forty-One by MoominQuartz (IceCreAMS)</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24006550">Forty, Forty-One</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceCreAMS/pseuds/MoominQuartz'>MoominQuartz (IceCreAMS)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Bad Things Happen Bingo [17]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Adventure Zone (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bad Things Happen Bingo, Canon Backstory, Character Study, Drabble, Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon, Survivor Guilt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 22:41:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>681</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24006550</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceCreAMS/pseuds/MoominQuartz</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>He should've tasted the food.</p><p>References Episode 48: The Eleventh Hour, Chapter 8.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Bad Things Happen Bingo [17]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1648339</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Bad Things Happen Bingo</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Forty, Forty-One</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/greedlings/gifts">greedlings</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for Bad Things Happen Bingo, the prompt: Taako + Survivor's Guilt. Thanks Josie for the prompt!! I haven't written anything for this fandom yet and it was fun to dabble in it.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Taako has never known guilt like this. All-encompassing, all-consuming. The sort of thing that eats at your stomach lining and causes acid reflux, the sort of thing that burrows deep into your heart and claims it for itself, refusing to allow anyone or anything else inside.</p><p>On the run, from place to place, traveling without another body at his side, Taako wonders if he should have done something different. The logical, rational part of him insists that the only reason he’s <em> alive </em> right now, is because he <em> didn’t. </em></p><p>The other part of him, the one that stubbornly insists on raw emotion — as if this is the time or the place for that sort of thing, as if there is <em> ever </em>a time and place for it — insists that if he had tasted the damn food, everything would be different. Over three dozen lives would’ve been saved in exchange for his own, and he’s just one measly wizard. </p><p>A devilishly handsome wizard, but still.</p><p>Half a town, dead, all because he thought transmuting the elderberries from skin to skinless and back again would be fun, and he’d slipped, and he’d turned them into <em> nightshade</em>.</p><p>“Come now, Taako,” he murmurs to his own reflection in the bath water one night, when he reaches a town whose inn supplies baths at a rate he can afford. “Death comes to all of us, eventually.”</p><p>But it should have come to him, and it hadn’t.</p><p>The entity they meet in the Crystal Kingdom, the one that calls himself Kravitz, claims to be a servant of the Raven Queen, informs Taako that he’s died eight times. And Taako can only nod, because maybe if he’s already died eight times, he was spared another death in that one moment. </p><p>As if the Raven Queen could’ve had anything to do with his own mistake.</p><p>“Thirty cloves of garlic,” Taako mutters to himself in the dead of night, when Magnus and Merle have long since gone to bed, when meditation is no longer restful. “Salt, pepper, to taste. Three whole chicken breasts. Two teaspoons of Worcester sauce. An elderberry garnish.”</p><p>Elderberry. Elderberry. Fucking <em>elderberry.</em></p><p>June takes his hand as if she holds all the answers in her palm, and Taako follows her. In this recreation of the scene of his greatest crime and his greatest mistake, she pulls back the curtain to reveal to him to the behind-the-scenes, to the “making of,” and it’s the kind of twist he ought to be charged for.</p><p>Sazed clutches a bottle of arsenic, curled over, guilt killing him the same way it’s been twisting deeper and deeper into Taako’s gut every day since then, the way <em> he’s </em>been twisting it in deeper.</p><p>“I guess this must come as some small relief,” June murmurs.</p><p>Taako laughs.</p><p>Forty people still died. He should’ve tasted his damn food.</p><p>But it wasn’t the fucking elderberry, and he finds it suddenly so much easier to get over it now.</p><hr/><p>Years later, he still wakes up with nightmares. Kravitz holds him and Taako has to carefully explain, after several months of their intermittent interruptions, that this wasn’t a result of some sort of post-apocalyptic stress syndrome, but because of a mistake he’d made a lifetime ago that he should be long over.</p><p>A fire burns in Kravitz’s eyes when he suggests tracking down Sazed. Though tempting, Taako saw the twisted look on Sazed’s face, and he knows that man’s probably not quite over that petty decision, yet.</p><p>Kravitz holds his head between his hands and swears that his decision to not eat the food is what means he’s alive now. Even if he’d tasted it, the poisoning would’ve taken long enough to act that he’d already have begun serving it, and then it would be forty-one deaths on Sazed’s head.</p><p>Figures.</p><p>“Y’know,” Taako murmurs, “survivor’s guilt is overrated.”</p><p>The nightmares still come. He still looks at his own reflection — not quite as handsome, these days — and wonders if he should’ve done something different.</p><p>But that monster in his heart has been uprooted, and he refuses to renew its lease.</p>
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